Religion As It Relates to Genetics

Malcolm explains his concept of "evolutionary vortexes" - how cultures create bottlenecks selecting for certain sociological profiles over generations. He analyzes examples like Calvinists' happiness, Jewish mysticism, and Catholic anti-nepotism norms. Simone questions why this isn't more obvious. They discuss how technology will let intentional cultural selection rapidly shape future minds.

Malcolm: [00:00:00] So a great example of this that I'd always say, is when I talk to people and I'm like, yeah, you know, what do you think of Cubans? You talk to a Florida, you're like, what do you think of Cuban? They go, yeah, Cubans. There's the typical Cuban sociological profile.

Malcolm: They're very conservative. They're really good at business. They're really educated. And it's that's not the profile of Cubans more broadly. That's the profile of the Cubans that were differentially sorted into trying to escape a communist dictatorship and move to the United States You know, to an extent within any immigrant population depending on how the, the sorting worked, you're often going to get a very specific sociological profile that may not be the dominant sociological profile of the mainland population.

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Simone: So Malcolm, you know, how. Someone in our family once called me a vortex of failure.

Malcolm: Yes, somebody did! They're like, Simone is a vortex of failure, Malcolm, and she is pulling you down. [00:01:00] Well,

Simone: there are other types of vortexes that I think you find very interesting, and I have failed to understand why they're so interesting.

Simone: So can you please explain your concept of evolutionary vortexes with this old vortex of failure?

Malcolm: Yes, well, so this is a very interesting thing for us. So a lot of people know that we don't believe that there are persistent, meaningful genetic differences between things that we, in our society, view as things like ethnic groups and stuff like that.

Malcolm: And a lot of people view

Simone: that The concept of racism or race supremacy as being, like, pretty frickin dumb, because, like I don't know given

Malcolm: the evolutionary... Why is it dumb? It's dumb because small groups, family groups, religious groups local environmental groups, it's not because we don't believe that genetic differences don't exist between populations.

Malcolm: We just believe that they change way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way faster than this, like... You know, 100, 000 year difference that defines ethnic groups. Exactly. [00:02:00] So a great example of this is like San Francisco, right? When you look at San Francisco, you had this environment where during the gold rush, you basically had a siren call to people from a diversity of , ethnic and cultural backgrounds that said, anybody who uniquely is drawn to high risk High reward, economic opportunities move to this area.

Malcolm: Okay. That's what the gold rush was. And people would die for these opportunities. I mean, the Donner party, et cetera. Right. And then is it a surprise that, you know, a century later, Silicon Valley starts there, which, which was really driven because the venture capital industry started there where you had.

Malcolm: High risk, high reward opportunities explode as like a way to generate wealth and ruin people all over again. And this is what a vortex does. Because there was the first event that caused a genetic [00:03:00] predilection within that environment, that then made it more likely that the second event would happen, which then further...

Malcolm: condensed that genetic predilection by again, sending out this, this signal all over the world for people like that. Right. Yeah. To the extent where you see things like really high rates of things like, because then what was the other thing that was really being selected for by that cultural vortex, it was.

Malcolm: High knowledge of like engineering and math. And this is why you had such high rates of autism in Silicon Valley, some of the highest rates in the world. And that is wild, but you also see this on a cultural level.

Malcolm: So our cultures essentially co evolve. with us. And they alter our brains so that if you think of humans as like the biological firmware and cultures as this set of software that's co evolving on top of them, they co evolve together synergistically. So an example of this could be our we have a secular friend who's from the Quaker [00:04:00] tradition.

Malcolm: And she feels like she regularly hears voices talking to her to an extent, right? Saying, okay, well, she,

Simone: she essentially like she talks with God. Like she, she searches for the truth from within. Right.

Malcolm: She talks, well, she's talking was so, so auditory hallucinations are actually much more common than people think about a quarter of the population experiences and at some point in their lives.

Malcolm: But Quaker culture would massively reward an individual for having auditory hallucinations. Whereas other cultural groups like the Calvinist cultural group, which lived alongside them geographically massively would punish auditory hallucinations. So. So everyone from the Calvinist cultural group who experienced them would have gone to the Quaker cultural group and people in the Quaker cultural group who didn't experience them might think God wasn't talking to them or like they didn't get why people were doing this in their cultural group and they would leave at a higher rate.

Malcolm: And so you're going to end up with more auditory hallucinations within people who come from this Quaker cultural group. Now this gets really interesting. Interesting. Because what it [00:05:00] means is that not all software packages, not all cultures are going to fit well. on all individuals, all biologies.

Malcolm: So one of the places where I've heard this, where it was really most meaningful to me is you know, I was talking with somebody who was like involved, I think it was like the JN community in the San Francisco area. And they were talking about. How high the, the suicide rate was among people of a broadly European ethnic background who converted to Jainism.

Malcolm: Yeah. And I, and I suspect you'd likely see this more broadly. If you look at. Europeans who convert to not like the fake American form of Buddhism, but like real Buddhism I'd imagine you're going to see a pretty high suicide rate. And I, this makes a lot of sense to me. If a cultural group has co evolved with a cultural software, For thousands of years, you can't just plug it on top of another cultural [00:06:00] group and expect them to work together really well.

Malcolm: And this is why when we say our goal is genuinely people are like, are you trying to recruit people into your weird secular Calvinist thing? I'm like, no, I do not think most people would really thrive in an environment where it is constantly reinforced how sinful Happiness, music, fun, is, right?

Malcolm: And again, this is something that people don't get, so people can say oh, then why do you do things that are sinful? Why do you do things like, you know, drink alcohol, for example, right? There's no efficaciousness behind that. And, and the, the, the Calvinism as a, as a cultural understanding is, is mankind is wretched.

Malcolm: You know, we are, completely morally destitute. And it's through recogni